Windborn Ghosts
by gunshou
Summary: Crisis is supposed to spawn relationships, but sometimes things don't happen like they should. Elena should trust her instincts.


**note:** FFVII: Advent Children. Again, an older story uploaded from LJ to here. Feedback is always lovely!

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Elena absolutely hated helicopter rides in a fierce wind. Unfortunately, as the Turks' primary method of travel, the 'copter figured prominently in her job, which she still took painfully seriously even after the end of the world. But the deafening whir of the blades, the swoop of the chopper, and the bizarre tilt of the formerly level horizon all conspired to nauseate her, and she just couldn't perform at her best when she wanted so badly to void her breakfast. She could feel it in her throat, and it was all she could do to keep swallowing desperately.

"Hey, Elena, lookin' a little green there. Make sure you puke outside, ok?" And the bird made another dizzying lean so that the open hatch loomed directly below her. She thrust one hand out to brace against the cabin's frame and grabbed at her equipment bag with the other, the restraints tight over her chest. Jagged peaks rose out of the clouds directly below her feet, the cold air of the Northern Crater cutting straight through her jacket despite its layers of chocobo down. She shut her eyes; her knuckles whitened around the strap of her bag and she barely heard Tseng calmly ask Reno to level the chopper out.

Elena revised her opinion—she didn't actually hate the helicopter ride as much as its pilot.

"Elena?"

Her eyes flew open and she forced a smile. "I'm fine, sir. No problem."

Tseng frowned—a minute tightening around his eyes and the corners of his lips, almost impossible to see unless one knew every nuance of his expression. Or had dreamt of that face for three years, yearning for the approval that so rarely showed. Elena looked away before her own expression could change and took a deep breath.

"Really sir, I just drank my coffee too fast, and I might be coming down with something, you know there's that stomach bug going around the lodge, Rude was feeling kind of under the weather yesterday, but it's probably nothing, so don't worry, I'm fit for the mission."

She could hear Reno laughing above the sound of the rotors and the wind, and her nausea faded as she calculated the probability of surviving a possible crash after she killed him. She wished she'd bothered to log more hours in the 'copter before the company exploded so she could have piloted—with Rude on duty to Rufus, only Reno had the flight experience to handle the helicopter in the Northern Crater's fierce winds. At least he would remain in the air while she and Tseng searched for...it. Her. Whatever pronoun applied. The turbulent ride wasn't the only thing unsettling her stomach.

"Sir?" She waited until Tseng looked up from the file he was restlessly flipping through. "Why... Why now, sir? All this time..." She shook her head, frustrated by the torrent of words building up in her throat, none of which seemed adequate to express her confusion.

"Good question," Reno commented. "Pieces of Jenova've been sitting in the Lifestream since Meteor, who the hell's gonna come looking for 'em now? Sephiroth's dead, right?"

"Indeed," Tseng replied, his voice low and steady in their earpieces, "Sephiroth is dead. But Jenova is not. Her cells are a cancer, and can continue to grow even after the host dies. Finding a core of alien matter may assist us in...other inquiries."

"Like Rufus," Elena mused, convinced she spoke too softly for him to hear.

"Like Rufus' condition, yes," Tseng said, the small lines back around his eyes and mouth. "And the condition of dozens of children all over the Planet."

"So now we're gonna save the world, huh?" Reno drawled. "Nice. Can't let Cloud and his buddies have all the fun all the time."

"Are we?" Elena asked Tseng. "Going to save the world, I mean."

He smiled at her—that handsome, faintly cold smile that never reached his eyes and yet always set her heart racing. "We're Turks, Elena. We do the job, whatever it may be."

"Yes, sir." The view tilted wildly again and she gritted her teeth. "Reno—"

"We're here," he answered, the teasing gone from his voice. No more jokes or fancy flying designed to make her lose her breakfast; they were on the job. Mission start.

Elena took a deep breath, secured her bag, and attached the line clips to her belt. Tseng's hand curled over her shoulder, warm through her layers of clothing, warm in the cold air. She turned her head, and found his face startlingly close to hers. Her heart rose into her mouth and she had to remember to breathe. His dark eyes stared unblinkingly, and she forced herself to stop watching the movement of his lips and start listening to his words.

"Remember, we have no precise coordinates. Take it slowly. Miss nothing."

"Yes, sir. I will, sir." She stepped up to the open hatch.

"Good luck, guys." Reno shrugged. "I dunno if that means you find it or you don't."

"Just be here when we radio so we can get back," she replied, the nausea gone despite the vertigo-inducing view beneath her boots. She was on the job now, and her nerves were steel.

Hours later, those nerves were close to giving way under the relentless moaning of the wind. Elena imagined she could hear the Planet screaming in the rush of air, all the people killed by Shinra's wars and Shinra's greed surging through the Lifestream to howl curses at her. The occasional pauses were somehow worse; she thought she could hear the brush of hands or feet against stones behind her, or the soft clicks of metal striking—the clasps on Sephiroth's coat, perhaps. After a while, she stopped jumping like a scared rabbit each time the wind died into eerie silence and picked up again without warning. Each time she spun around she saw nothing unusual, certainly not any vengeful ghosts or phantom Generals, and what did she expect to see anyway? A flash of silver hair melting into the cover of the rocks? Sephiroth was dead, killed by that crazybrave ex-SOLDIER Strife, and she wasn't getting the damn mission accomplished by startling at shadows.

Besides, if Sephiroth's ghost wanted to kill her, he wouldn't follow her around this freezing hole in the ground for half the day. He'd just swoop down from above like some avenging angel and stab her. Wouldn't he?

"At least if he did, I'd know we were getting somewhere," she muttered.

"What was that, Elena?" Tseng's voice crackled in her ear, and she cursed silently for forgetting the radio was on; the last thing Reno needed was more grist for teasing her.

"Nothing, sir, just talking to myself."

"Hmm. Nothing wrong with that. If you start convincing yourself that you're descended from a god, though, please do let me know quickly."

Laughter bubbled out from her throat, surprising her. They all laughed so rarely these days; even Reno's snide comments generally produced eyerolls rather than true amusement. Elena sometimes thought that they had it all wrong—they'd survived a calamity and the world they knew falling to pieces, they'd found each other in the aftermath battered and broken but living, they'd started to rebuild and pulled themselves back together by pure determination. Surely they deserved a little joy at the sheer wonder of still being alive? Maybe. Maybe it would be easier if Rude couldn't predict the weather by the ache in his leg, the pins taken out only last year. If Rufus weren't confined to the motorized chair, lowered blinds shutting out the magnificent view of Healin's waterfall and the sheet over his face shielding what remained of his vision from bright light. If Tseng's customary grace didn't show that little hitch, hand pressed against his chest as he surmounted a broad rock, a wince of pain under the hair whipped over his face by the wind.

No Turk signed on thinking the job would be easy, or without injury. None of them expected rampaging WEAPONs, collapsing cities, and murderous sword-wielding maniacs, though. At least, those things hadn't been listed on the health insurance waiver Elena remembered signing.

She dropped her bag and leaned against the rough wall of the Crater a moment, hands in the small of her back to stretch out a kink. Something moved in her peripheral vision, some bit of darkness amidst all the white snow and gray rock and she whirled—_again_—and saw nothing. Exasperated, she closed her eyes and let her head fall back, cheeks stinging red with the cold and tiny pricks of ice and dirt the wind constantly tossed around. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with frost and the faintly floral scent of the Lifestream that rose so close to the surface here (not remembering when that lily-like perfume became associated in her mind with the Planet's lifeforce, but it smelled calming and clean even here on the edge of forever), and squeezing her eyes shut hard enough that stars burst against the blackness. She wondered if Rufus' world had become mostly that—little explosions against inky dark—and almost hoped for it. He wouldn't be able to see the ugly rot of the 'Stigma scaling up his hands and face. They were never going to find anything out here.

The hand on her shoulder should have startled her or sent her reaching for her gun, but it was warm and her stomach fluttered, so she didn't bother to open her eyes and confirm Tseng's presence before he spoke.

"Are you alright?"

"Yes, sir." She tilted her head forward now, thick blonde hair brushing her cheeks, and it was soft but not as soft as she imagined his hair would be if she took off her gloves and caught the thick mass of it in her hands. Not as soft as the raven-dark strands framing a stern, pale face frowning in concern—only a slight, almost unnoticeable movement around the mouth and the corners of red eyes like summon materia.

_"I cast the strongest Cure spells I could. The bleeding has stopped, but he needs medical attention."_ And later, at her blurted questions, _"Consider it professional courtesy."_ His hair, dark and straight and soft as a father's kiss had brushed over her shoulder as he rose, the tattered cloak unfurling around him like bat's wings, and she had noticed the graceful way he stood, an echo of something familiar. But then her arms had been full of her boss' limp body, blood warm over her knees, and she never thought to question why this one, dark and forbidding, had chosen to stay behind with the mangled Turk. Or how he'd known they'd come for their fallen.

The Lifestream could alter recollections, she remembered from the briefing. It could intensify the sensations, make recall as sharp as a blade. Tseng's hand on her shoulder seemed the only thing that anchored her in the driving wind. She stepped away from the rock, away from the warmth of his body, and breathed in the sharp air, tasted the insubstantial bitterness of gun oil and leather, saw silvery threads floating like feathers behind her closed eyelids. Elena heard Tseng breathe her name, felt his body tense to pull her back to safety, as though any of them were ever safe—they were Turks, they did the job or died on duty, and had no room in their lives for rest or worry or romance. She kept telling herself that as the days stretched into weeks and the bruises and lacerations and broken wrist healed. As the ugly gashes on chest and back faded to brown scabs, white scars. As the ache in her throat hardened into a lump of things unsaid, emotions unaddressed, and she gave up playing nursemaid and nursing dreams that he would pull her down into the bed with him, pains forgotten. The wind rushed past her in a whirlwind of disappointments, and Elena knew the only ghosts that haunted her now were missed opportunities.

"Elena..." Tseng's voice seemed to come from far away, maybe the center of his own windstorm of doubts. "Elena, come away from the edge."

"Yes, sir," she whispered, or thought she did. Her throat bled from the cold. Would he save her, if she fell jumped flew off the slope? Of course he would—professional courtesy. And why did she always feel the need to push her luck? They had survived the end of days together, and wasn't that a bond greater than any office romance or passing flirtation?

"Elena, please." The concern in his voice warmed her. She opened her eyes, blinked away the lingering starbursts at the edges of her vision, and looked down the crater at one of the hardened pools of Lifestream below.

For a moment, she saw nothing but the dirty smears of rock jutting out from the snow. Then her eyes focused on something different, and her heart leapt into her throat. She threw herself forward, grinning as she slid-fell the thirty or so feet down the slope, and called back to him, words almost taken by the wind.

"Tseng! Look at this."

"Hmm?" He climbed down carefully, as controlled in his movements as though he descended the wooden stairs at the lodge. For once, Elena neglected to watch him, her attention entirely caught by the grisly object a stone's throw away. She knelt, keeping tenuous balance on the slick surface (remembering how she once tumbled ass over teakettle down Mount Icicle's diamond-rated ski slope), and reached out for the thing. Her gloved hand stopped inches away from mottled blue-white skin and closed instead on silvery strands clumped with snow and ice. She tugged lightly and the thing shifted closer. Tseng arrived at her side with a tiny gasp, but she didn't look to see him grimace; she pulled a little harder on the long hair wound around her fingers, but the thing seemed caught.

He crouched down and smiled with grim satisfaction. "Paydirt."

The wind stopped blowing a moment; Elena took a chance and yanked. The skin split and peeled away, leaving her with a hank of dirty hair attached to a clump of something disgusting dangling from her hand. She grimaced and tried to shake it off, but the mess clung.

"Not a pretty sight, is it?" she asked, looking up at Tseng. A shadow blurred in the rocks off to their left; on cue, the wind picked up again, and Elena didn't bother to acknowledge what she hadn't really seen.

"Who cares," Reno broke in over the radio, sounding less than enthused at their discovery. "Just get the damn thing."

Elena stuck her tongue out, feeling lightheaded. They had actually discovered the last remnants of Jenova; now all they had to do was collect the head and get back home. Tseng's hand tightened on her shoulder, and she felt warm all the way through. He braced against her, leaned out over the ice, and managed to snag the thing with the edge of the collection bag he held. His hair, whipped by the wind, obscured her vision a moment; she missed the second shadow that moved in closer on their right. Tseng settled back, securing the bag with quick, efficient motions, and nodded at her.

"Reno, the chopper," he ordered, and offered a hand to help Elena up. She gave him the one not tangled with Jenova crud, leaning close to him as the roar of the helicopter blades grew louder in the howling wind. His dark eyes took up her whole field of view; the smile formed by his mouth showed in the tiny lines at the corners of his eyes, almost unnoticeable. "Well done," he murmured, while she caught her breath and tried to swallow the sudden blockage in her throat. Tseng dropped his chin a fraction; she lifted hers, and the wind with all its ghosts died to nothing. "Well done indeed," he praised quietly. Elena wondered if she should close her eyes again.

The shadows solidified into silver and black, and the first gunshots sounded like full-scale explosions in the absence of the wind.


End file.
